Wednesday, April 12, 2006

While You Were Out...

The bodies of storm victims are still being discovered in New Orleans — in March alone there were nine, along with one skull.

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A landlord in the Lakeview section put a "for sale" sign outside a house, unaware that his tenant's body was in the attic. Two weeks ago, searchers in the Lower Ninth Ward found a girl, believed to be about 6, wearing a blue backpack. Nearby, they found part of a man who the authorities believe might have been trying to save her.

[On Friday, contractors found a body in the attic of a home in the Gentilly neighborhood that had been searched twice before, officials said.]

In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, there were grotesque images of bodies left in plain sight. Officials in Louisiana recovered more than 1,200 bodies, but the process, hamstrung by money shortages and red tape, never really ended.

I would suggest to you that efforts were made to keep the death toll "low."

Imagine the outcry if the "number" had been greater than "9/11."

"We never reached out to anyone to tell our story, because there's no ending to our story," said Wanda Jackson, 40, whose family is still waiting for word of her 6-year-old nephew, swept away by floodwaters as his mother clung to his 3-year-old brother.

"Because we haven't found our deceased. Being honest with you, in my opinion, they forgot about us."